Problogger

You know, I’ve mentioned the name many times, and it hit me that many people might not have any idea who or what I’m talking about. So, here we go, me talking about a blogging superstar.

Darren Rowse runs a blog and website called Problogger, and he’s one of the very few people who gets to get away with telling the rest of us how to do it and not say he’s full of stuff because he’s one of the first million dollar a year bloggers in the world. He’s a guy who offers so much information that I believe everyone can benefit from visiting his site.

Let’s take this step by step. Rowse was a former seminary student who decided on a career change and wanted to explore the world of blogging. He started writing his blog in September 2004, and like most of the rest of us, most of his early posts were good but had no real readers; at least had no commenters. It would be a good thing for people to think about looking through some of his early posts, which are also educational as it regards better blogging, as well as to see that everyone has a humble beginning.

At some point Rowse figured out that making money by blogging really is about two things. One, you have to start driving a lot of traffic to your site. Two, you have to be ready to accept paid advertising.

He did both, first finding his way to driving great traffic to his site by keeping his content at a very high quality level, sometimes writing 3 or 4 posts a day. Then he set up a rate for advertisers to put ads on his site, and he was off to the races. He even experimented briefly with Text Link Ads, making some money but getting out before he lost all of his page rank (I wasn’t as smart; lost mine for about a year…), yet they remain one of his sponsors, which he likes to call them instead of advertisers. I know because I asked him about this, and he actually responded to my query. That doesn’t happen often with people who get lots of comments.

To be totally fair to everyone else, he didn’t just sit on one blog to make all this money. He set up a consortium of bloggers called B5 Media (which was sold in 2012). If you check out his full website rather than just his blog you’ll see he takes on more than just blogging. He also has other blogs that he writes, including a popular one on photography.

He added video a few years ago and people seem to like listening to what he has to say, based on the number of comments he has on almost every single post. And he now has a series of writers who write some of his content; in essence, it’s now more of a full time business than just a guy sitting at his desk writing blog posts.

Problogger is one of the most genuine sites about blogging and almost exclusively blogging. Darren Rowse proved that you can make money blogging. He also showed that it takes more than just writing posts to make that money, which many people don’t realize. It’s about more than just writing quality posts and writing comments on other people’s blogs to drive traffic your way. You have to think of it as a business and do business types of things to make money at it.

Now you know why I mention him and his site so often. It’s good stuff; check it out.

I’ve heard so many good things about him. Just curious, did you get a copy of his 30 day blogging ebook? Not sure about the exact title of that ebook. One popular blogger recommended that ebook to her readers too. I hope to get more feedback with it before getting my own.
.-= Michael Frost´s last blog ..Choosing a Layout for your Kitchen =-.